From TPM Reader GS, the email that I referred to in the previous post up earlier this evening …
We still know very little about the shooter – but perhaps he has more in common with the way too common mass shooters rather than Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan.
There is the young age and apparent social rejection/isolation, and also the obv suicidal nature of trying to kill a heavily guarded former President from an exposed and visible position.
We do not know that at this point, but if that turns out to be the case, then that is a completely different social context. Then it is not yet another case of political violence but yet another case of the epidemic of mass shootings, usually by young men.
As I noted in the post below, I think GS is on to something. Obviously, trying to shoot a former and possibly future president is as political as it gets. Certainly in its effect if nothing else. But if you read between the lines in the stories on the investigation into Thomas Crooks it seems clear authorities are having a very hard time coming up with any clear motive for the attack or even a framework of political beliefs that would suggest one.
The current information is that he gave a single $15 donation to a progressive voter turnout group on inauguration day 2021, when he was 17, and then registered as a Republican when he turned 18 the following year. And that’s it. He seems to have had a limited social media presence with no obvious political leanings or content. His one affiliation appears to have been his membership in a local gun club. There’s recent sociological research focused actually on precisely this part of the country, like actually western Pennsylvania, that discusses the way these gun clubs have transformed over the last 10 to 15 years into hard right conservative milieus. When he was killed by Secret Service snipers he was wearing a t-shirt from “Demolition Ranch,” a firearms YouTube channel which has the lead guy shooting a lot of things with high powered rifles. His other interests appeared to be chess, video games and learning to code.
I don’t think we need to draw from this that Crooks was some Trumper or conservative per se. As I said, I suspect we’ll find he didn’t really have terribly coherent political beliefs. But the young, socially-isolated, gun-obsessed man is a kind of radicalization of its own. And goes to the idea that this is really more a variant of the school shooting, mass shooting phenomenon.
